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Like a cheap tie-in from the late 80's

  • NTC3
  • 03/19/2015 08:50 PM
  • 823 views
Games based on novels (most famously the Metro 2033 games) are something that has always interested me. They're typically created long after the work came out and became popular, and are made with at least some thought and care to fit into the book's world and be a worthy adaptation/successor. It's also usually true of comic book adaptations (i.e. The Darkness), and very much unlike films, where you'll typically get a tie-in game rushed out in a couple of months to meet the launch data of whatever blockbuster it's based on, with a bare semblance of a plot and mechanics lifted and re-skinned from superior AAA titles.

Thus, After Man quickly got my attention when I stumbled upon it, and its star rating convinced me to give it a try. Unfortunately, it is far closer in spirit to the film tie-ins I just described above, only adjusted for age. The only things that appear to come directly from the book are the gene-modified plants and specimens you can find and examine in the research lab halfway through the game, plus the modified humans in the endings. It says a lot that they're still the most memorable parts of After Man.

Storyline

There isn't one. Sure, you have the ship sent out from Earth to colonise another planet faraway (a bit like last year's Interstellar) after our Gaia could no longer support life, and which ends up crashing, with our protagonist the lone survivor amidst alien beasties running amok. However, that is called premise, while the actual plot arc is practically absent: you just control a human-shaped block of wood in performing some puzzles until you finally get to choose one of the three endings about an hour/hour and a half later.

Does this sound too harsh? It probably does, so let's go back a bit and analyse it chronologically. The game begins with an intro sequence that briefly tells us the Earth was ruined, etc. and shows the ship we're on blasting off and then travelling through the solar system towards its destination. It can be skipped, but I don't recommend it, because while the ship still looks rather goofy, the backgrounds are done quite well and the soundtrack is very fitting.

It's supposed to put you into the contemplative mood for the start of the game, and it succeeds primarily due to soundtrack. It's far from perfect, though, since it goes on for too long for audiovisual element alone to carry the scene, and I would really have appreciated some text scroll at the bottom to further detail importance of the mission. How many people are on-board, for how long they're travelling, their median age, the ship's dimensions, the stats from ruined Earth - all of those would've had added greatly to the mood of the scene.

However, that's literally the least of game's story problems, as you find out when the ship finally lands/crashes, and you're given control of our unnamed character awakening from the cryo-pod. The only thing he says is this:



No excitement at getting to live on a new world instead of choking to death back on Earth?

Not too promising, but I suppose could be worse. You walk out of the strangely small pod room and enter a hallway that's partly on fire, an event that elicits absolutely zero reaction from our "protagonist". Sadly, this is not an isolated event, and he will remain totally unresponsive throughout the entire game, only saying something when you interact with whatever items you can. Technically, there's one instance where he finally reflects on the perils he's gone through.



Too little, too late doesn't even begin to cover it. This would've been appropriate when he first has to escape from monsters, while this screenshot is from late-game, when he already knows that everyone else is dead and he's gravely outnumbered. For me, though, the tipping point came when he finds a sharpened pipe by a female corpse and soon uses it to stab a monster in one of the rooms. This happens automatically (already taking the player out of the game), and he's not in the least affected by it, and doesn't deign to comment on having narrowly defeated another being. From then on, I felt zero attachment to him and couldn't care less if he died.

Having failed thoroughly with the main plot, After Man does at least make a good stab at writing up the item descriptions. Pretty much everything that you would want to examine can be examined, descriptions for the scientific stuff are always very good, and a few others even give a hint of a personality to our character. The times when he shows some humour and bewilderment at modern art or crazy experiments, or mentions working with other scientists in passing feel like a consolation prize for him being a blank slate otherwise. Even those bits can still be marred by the utterly implausible lack of caring, however.



Totally the words of a man who escaped death by mauling about a dozen times by now.

Gameplay

A typical adventure formula, done badly. You wonder about the rooms and corridors, trying to collect items that'll allow you to progress. You don't get to combine any of them, or collect anything that's not directly related to the plot, so that means there's one item per room, if that. The game eschews traditional RPG inventory because it's not needed; you'll usually have only one item at your person, and the most I ever had was 5. All the puzzles with them are very simple and require little thinking, and yet the first one still manages to be utterly bizarre.



Why the hell would anybody do that?

There's no way the player character (or player themselves, for that matter) could've seen it coming, and yet you'll usually collect items with no idea why they're important. When you collect some key/keycard/dead creature, for example, the player character will NEVER say why it's important or why you need to go there, a situation best shown with the colored keys I carried for god knows what throughout the whole game, before it turned out that they unlocked the gene splicing machine and gave you access to the ending choice.

We'll get back to the endings later, but for now let's cover the survival horror elements. These are properly introduced as you descend into the research area and properly encounter the beasties roaming around. All of them move with different speeds and kill you in one hit with some graphic death animation and all you need to do is manoeuvre past them to get wherever you need. There's a nice move in a couple of areas where you go through it, avoid the monster, then come back out to find that it's spawned in a different location (i.e. practically next to you).



You'll probably see the game-over screen a couple of times because of it.

Other than that, however, it's very bare-bones and largely ineffective, because the atmosphere and sense of involvement required for them to work are missing. There's rarely much build-up to entering a room/corridor with a roaming monster, and since you don't care about the player character, his death doesn't mean much, especially since checkpoints are frequent. You only get four slots instead of the usual 15, true, but given the size of the game they're more than enough.

To elaborate further, another reason why After Man fails to be more than mildly unsettling is because of the stifling linearity in all its aspects. Having choice within a game increases player freedom, true, but what people often miss is that freedom comes with responsibility, and having to choose between options means that you can pick the wrong one. Resource management in horror like Silent Hill or Resident Evil is effective because at it's simplest, it's a choice to use a valuable item now or save it in case it's needed later, a choice that constantly hangs above the player's head and generates anxiety. In After Man, there's very little to choose, and instead of disempowering the player, it makes them far more confident, as the only path left to you is the path to victory. The player cannot run, but that's because they never need to run. The moment when you enter a single-width tunnel and a monster spawns behind you is not scary because you know that this was your only option at this point, and the game now has to let you win this one. There are only two puzzles where you're given choices that can lead to failure, and unsurprisingly they're by far the best gameplay it offers.

Now, there are only the endings left. You can choose between two or three of them (the third, aquatic one is only available if you figure out/save scum through the illogical dead creature puzzle near the end of the game), and one is a bad ending, and it's easy to know which one is it if you read through their descriptions. In all of them, the game becomes, in another reviewer's words, a diorama, where you're given a very large world (at least, it feels like that after the cramped confines of the ship) to explore as whatever creature you've created with no risk of dying (in good endings, that is) until you find a home and food sources for it, which triggers the summary screen. The dioramas all look really nice, and full of diverse, animated wildlife (bad ending aside again) which is good, because visuals are your only reward. Even in good endings, your achievements are doubtful to say the least, and while the intent is clear, the same cannot be said of logic, which is a considerable failing in a sci-fi work adaptation.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

A fair bit of has already been covered previously, so I'll go through it quickly. The cutscene art is always good, while the gameplay graphics on offer start off rather poor and gradually improve until you get to the really impressive ending sections. This can also be said of the level design, and a significant reason for the initial visual failings is due to the mishmashed that doesn't look well or create much of an atmosphere.



See for yourself.

Both the graphics and design improve in the lab sections, but the game never really manages to convince that you're inside (I quote the game page) "a huge spaceship". Iron Gaia pulled it off through a combination of wide-open spaces, consistent (if rather ugly) design and good-old fashioned system logs describing just how large it is, but After Man always feels like a collection of narrow corridors and rooms designed for player's convenience only. I've praised the description before, but there's only so much it can do to generate atmosphere when labs only contain a single monster case and a couple of crates, "Living Quarters" don't appear to accomodate anybody besides yourself and there's a coal-fired engine generating power (lampshading it doesn't help that much, especially when it's only there for that nonsensical puzzle.)

Sound design is a bit uneven. The environmental beeps and such are alright but don't stand out, creature roars are actually pretty good, and footstep sounds are missing yet again. Seriously, they're an important part of audio experience, and better RM horror like Backstage is greatly enhanced by them. Backstage also featured great "climbing down the ladder" effect, which is absent in a similar section here. On the flip side, the effect played as player character wades through water at one point is truly excellent. To end on a high note (no pun intended) the soundtrack is unquestionably good, even though none of it is original, as the game acknowledges at the start. The theme that appears during some "actiony" bits feels a bit silly, but the rest is great. In spite of all the questionable layouts, you can't help but feel profound melancholy when wandering around lab corridors, reading about modified animals that still failed to survive on Earth in the end, all because of THAT theme playing along. If you're to experience After Man, do it for sake of that moment.

Conclusion

So, that's what After Man is like. I wanted to like it a lot, and there's some unquestionable good in it, but ultimately the game had went very much astray. I still want to see more games on here based on novels, and if you want to do so, go right ahead. Just please, spare a moment for who your main character is and how they will react to the situations you're putting them through.